Shining light onto darkness
Reporters working to expose church abuse drives the action in Spotlight
Spotlight opens with a hefty, dark frame obscuring most of the screen. As we track, it eventually reveals itself to be a police officer, in a nondescript Boston precinct at some indeterminate time in the 1970s.
The next bodies we see belong to a lawyer and a priest. The only words they have for the officer are to make sure the press doesn’t hear about what’s about to go on.
We don’t see how it’s handled, nor do we return to any of these people, their roles already fulfilled: Spotlight is a street-level view of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive coverup of Catholic priests’ molesting children in their city. But by necessity it has plenty to say about the conspiracy of minor silences that let something like that happen for so long.
For a story of such monumental scope, which probes some awfully big questions about what constitutes good and evil, writerdirector Tom McCarthy is finely attuned to low-key, infinitely human moments, the mosaic of intimacies that drive everyone through this story.
His journalists — the fourperson special investigations squad that gives the movie its name — are rumpled, lived-in people, dogged but grounded. Their leader is Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton), a man who went to a Catholic high school right across the street from the Globe, and whose intimate connections to the city are pushed and pulled from the moment the paper’s new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) asks him to dig into one particular priest.
An outsider, Baron’s bona fides are established during a meeting with Boston’s cardinal. When the cardinal tells Baron he thinks the city works best when its institutions are working together, all Baron can do is smile and respectfully disagree, having already started the ball rolling.
Back on the ground, Keaton gives Robinson a subdued intensity, less a snake than a trap-door spider. With his friends, including a pair of implicated lawyers, he can smile and glad-hand right until he senses the moment to pounce.
His team is more upfront, albeit in different ways. Taking the lead is Mike Rezendes, played with an off-kilter, tenacious earnestness by Mark Ruffalo. Its his legwork that drives the story. Even when sitting in waiting rooms, he looks like a runner at the starting blocks.
Where Rezendes is leaning on lawyers, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) spends much of her time tracking victims, her sympathies pulled by a grandmother who goes to church three times a week.
Both of them do some of their best work while simply listening, an underappreciated skill even for an investigative journalist that McCarthy portrays beautifully. Several times, he’ll hop back and forth between concurrent interviews, paying careful attention to the careful attention the journalist is paying to a source.
Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) rounds out the crew, mostly taking on the crucial task of research, patiently flipping through Catholic registers while paying no mind to the dead rats and poor lighting in the Globe’s library and archives.
Neither as sexy as trying to outfox conspirators nor as sympathetic as listening to victims, this is, in many ways, the hidden hinge on which the story swings, and McCarthy does a good job of sustaining tension through these moments. He dances his way through the careful poring, patterning these scenes like puzzlesolving, and stops to breathe just long enough to thrill in the eureka moments, as when the team cracks the church’s internal code for sweeping a bad priest under the rug.
Together they make a strong case for the importance of patient, persistent journalism. The most repeated line is Rezendes saying, “This story needed Spotlight.”
And as much as that’s the ego of a workaholic talking, it’s also McCarthy’s reminder that in a world where most of our ill deeds are done in darkness and hidden by silence, we need people who have not just the inclination, but also the resources to shine big lights.